olloclip - page 2

LAS VEGAS — For years now, Olloclip has been making stellar lenses that slip over the iPhone’s camera lens and enhance iPhoneography with the ability to take fisheye, telephoto and macro photos. But there has apparently been a struggle within Olloclip about whether or not to offer an iPad lens. Now the struggle is over, and iPad-loving photographers have won: The first Olloclip lens for iPad will be available soon.

Chong Pak, the company’s design director, told us there were only a few hurdles to clear before Olloclip went iPad — but those hurdles were tall.

You know how Apple keeps last year’s iPhone around, maybe adds a color, and sells it for less than the current model? That’s what Olloclip is doing with the 3-IN–1 lens. Kinda. The lens now fits the iPhone 5C, comes in a rainbow of matching colors, and costs just $60.

Olloclip has turned from being a maker of a neat novelty iPhone accessory into a purveyor of an entire iOS lens system. The newest member of the family is the Macro 3-IN–1, a set of closeup lenses with built-in light diffusers and high-quality optics.

I love my Olloclip, but I wince every time I use it and see its anodized red body next to my white iPhone. Kidding. Who cares if it matches? After all, it’s what’s on the inside that counts and beauty is only skiZzzzzzz.

Kidding again. Somebody at Olloclip cares, which is why you can now snap up a limited edition gold or space gray Olloclip, along with a neat Cyber Monday cyber discount of 10%.

At first look, the new Olloclip 4-In–1 isn’t something you’d buy if you already own the original. After all, it only has an extra macro lens to add to the existing macro lens, the fisheye and the wideangle.

But if you’re the kind of person who already bought an Olloclip, you clearly value the iPhone as more than a snapshot camera. And the optical improvements to the Olloclip might just tempt you to upgrade.

Olloclip’s new 4-in–1 lens “system” really is a system, all in one tiny, dense block of aluminum and glass. Like the other Olloclips, this one slides onto your iPhone’s top corner to add a lens between the world and your camera sensor. Unlike the other Olloclips, this one has four different lenses buried in the same unit.

The Olloclip must be one of the most useful iPhoneography accessories around. It’s a tiny clip-on widget which adds three additional lenses to the iPhone: macro, wide-angle and fisheye.

And until now, the only thing it was really lacking was a telephoto – after all the more-or-less 35mm equivalent lens on the iPhone is already wide enough for most uses. Olloclip has fixed that with this new lens, and added another handy accessory in the box: A circular polarizer.

I love my Olloclip, but there’s one thing I find myself wishing more and more often: that it came with a telephoto lens. Well, as you can probably guess that this post is about just that – a new telephoto from the makers of probably the best add-on lens for the iPhone.

It’s hard to believe, but some people don’t like the image-crunching, JPG-mangling special effects of app like Instagram. Instead, they want the output from the iPhone’s highly-tuned camera to be clean and as good as it can be. Which is why Olloclip’s new iPhone app goes in the opposite direction to most grungification apps and corrects errors introduced by the company’s clip-on lens of the same name.

Add the Olloclip accessory lens’s price to the cost of this new Olloclip Quick-Flip case and you get to $120. That used to be the price of an entry-level camera from a fairly decent brand, but I’d recommend you buy the Olloclip gear instead. Your iPhone’s camera way, way better than a $100-200 point-and-shoot, and the Olloclip gear makes it much easier to use.

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS – Good news for iPod touch-owning photography fans. Well, apart from the great camera Apple finally put in your 5G device. Now you can also get in on the add-on lens action iPhoneographers have been enjoying for so long. Behold: the Olloclip for the iPod Touch.

Out of all the junk that I own, there are a few objects which I love to use. And I mean “love” on a base, visceral level. These are the things that are so well suited to their tasks that they not only never get in the way, but they make doing that task better.

When I heat milk and cocoa in my small De Buyer saucepan, alone in my quiet kitchen late at night, I smile when I unhook the pan from its hanger and feel its durable heft; I smile again when I pour the cocoa into a thermos and feel the pan’s perfect balance. Even washing it and hanging it up again is a pleasure.

I also love to use my dented, stainless steel Klean Kanteen “Reflect” water bottle. It’s design is so simple, just two pieces of steel, a silicone ring and a bamboo disk, but it does its job so well that I really do take it everywhere with me. And it’s so trustworthy that I’ll toss it into my bag along with my iPad and never worry about it leaking.

Which is to say, some things are not just well designed, they’re actually wonderful objects in their own right. And Twelve South’s SurfacePad for the iPhone is one of those objects.

Apple was on fire in 2012. Along with the incredible iPhone 5, we saw the first retina tablet and the pocketable iPad mini. This was also the year in which Apple let the iPod touch out to play, giving it features on a par with the iPhone 4S instead of using leftover components from Google’s leftover Nexus parts bin.

But not everything from Apple made it into our top ten. The Retina MacBook Pro, despite being an amazing machine, is still a laptop, albeit one with a hi-res screen and no DVD player. And the new iMac’s most interesting contribution to tech is the HDD/SSD Fusion Drive. Sure, it’s skinny, but who really cares about a thin desktop machine? It’s like making the world’s thinnest lawnmower.

Most of the rest of my picks reflect the fact that high-tech consumer electronics are now as utterly mainstream as the iron or the microwave oven. Sure, us nerds still love to play with the latest crap, and there will always be plenty of ill-informed consumers who are suckered into buying cheapo Android tablets, but these days gadgets generally Just Work, and the differences are in the little details.

That’s why we have fitness widgets alongside fancy portable speakers and implausibly good-for-the-price headphones.

So, should you be in the mood to read yet another end-of-year best-of list, carry on.

Believe it or not, Christmas is almost here, and we’ll mark this midwinter festival by getting together with friends and family and continuing to drink and eat far too much.
Meanwhile, we also buy gifts for those same friends and family members, whether they want them or not. Luckily, we’re here to help, and if you follow our festive advice, your gifts just might make it into the “wanted” category.

From now until Christmas, Cult of Mac will be putting together holiday gift guys full of ideas for the special ones in your life, no matter what their interests or your budget. Today, we’re looking at gifts that cost less than $100, for people you like quite a lot, but not that much.

Believe it or not, Black Friday has already come and gone. Pretty soon the Christmas season will begin, and we’ll mark this midwinter festival by getting together with friends and family and continuing to drink and eat far too much.
Meanwhile, we also buy gifts for those same friends and family members, whether they want them or not. Luckily, we’re here to help, and if you follow our festive advice, your gifts just might make it into the “wanted” category.

From now until Christmas, Cult of Mac will be putting together holiday gift guys full of ideas for the special ones in your life, no matter what their interests or your budget. Today, we’re looking at gifts for people who have an unnatural love for their iPhones. Freaks.

Believe it or not, Black Friday has already come and gone. Pretty soon the Christmas season will begin, and we’ll mark this midwinter festival by getting together with friends and family and continuing to drink and eat far too much.
Meanwhile, we also buy gifts for those same friends and family members, whether they want them or not. Luckily, we’re here to help, and if you follow our festive advice, your gifts just might make it into the “wanted” category.
From now until Christmas, Cult of Mac will be putting together holiday gift guys full of ideas for the special ones in your life, no matter what their interests or your budget. Today, we’re looking at gifts for the lovely laydee in your life.

When I bought my first iPhone last month, there was one accessory I knew I wanted – the Olloclip lens. I actually kept the Olloclip site open in a Safari tab on my Mac so I could check every day to see if the fantastically popular iPhone 4/S accessory had been updated for the new iPhone.

I have been playing with this review unit for a couple weeks now and it’s just as great as I expected, although there are one or two things I don’t like. Let’s take a look…

One of the best pieces of iPhonography kit we’ve played with is the Olloclip, a tiny gizmo that clips onto the corner of the iPhone 4/S and gives photographers the use of three additional lenses; now it’s finally available for the iPhone 5.

If you’re into iPhoneography, chances are you’ve heard of Olloclip. The company sells one of the best lens kits there is for the iPhone. Apple gives you the ability to digitally zoom in the Camera app, but Olloclip takes photography to the next level with fisheye, wide angle, and macro lenses.

Olloclip is now offering its 3-in-1 lens kit for the iPhone 5.

Olloclip users rejoice. Or rather, Olloclip users who really hate any kind of lens-induced distortion, rejoice! For now you can grab a free app which will automatically remove and correct any and all of the bends, aberrations and artifacts of your handy add-on lens.

If I owned an iPhone, then I’d already have bought the Olloclip lens, a clip on widget which adds fisheye, macro and wideangle lenses to the iPhone using a slip-over clip. It’s impossible to line it up wrong, and it fits in a pocket or bag. But I don’t have an iPhone. I have an iPad. And I hate futzing around with all the magnetic lenses I have: they’re easy to lose, easy to get dirty and impossible to line up. What I need is a Mobi-Lens, a universal clip-on lens from Kickstarter.

Best Of Photo Accessories [Best Of]

We have noticed a big crossover between Apple users and camera geeks. And while the iPhone’s own camera continues to get better and better, your old SLR still has some life in it yet. And whatever you shoot with, there are accessories that can perk up your interest or let you catch an otherwise-impossible shot. These are the best of them.

We’ve seen some crazy accessories for Apple devices over the past year. Some of them have been so inventive that we’ve marveled at their originality and design, whereas others are so simple and functional that we’re knocking our heads wishing we had thought of something so elegant. Over the past year we’ve tried to cover the most important new accessories for Apple devices, and we’ve narrowed down the favorites to a list of 10 accessories that we think are the best of the best.

Now it’s your turn to tell us if you think we’re right, and let us know which is your favorite Apple accessory of 2011. Take a quick glance at the 10 items below and then vote in our poll to let us know which you think is the true winner.

This year we’ve seen a slew of absolutely amazing accessories for Apple devices come to the market for both the iMac, MacBooks, iPhones, iPad and AppleTV. Many of them have been remarkable but we’re having a hard time distinguishing which Apple Accessories should be considered the absolute best of 2011, so we’re turning to our readers to help us out.

The Olloclip ($70) is a clip-on device for iPhone 4 and 4S which gives the built-in camera lens a little more flexibility for wide angle and close-up shots.

It includes three lenses. At one end, the largest of the three is the fisheye. At the other end you have a general-purpose wide angle. Unscrew this, and you uncover a tiny macro lens nestling underneath.